Executive Summary: A group of Mexican hackers identifying themselves as the “Ciber Protesta Mexicanas”, hacked numerous government websites on their independence day. All the hacked pages were replaced by a brief message criticizing the Mexican government. Their goal was to instill in the minds of the various government agencies, political parties, ministries that the recent election of President Felipe Calderon was in many ways fraudulent. They claimed that this is a peaceful cyber protest by students, workers and productive Mexicans who are fed up with recent activities by the Mexican government and are looking for a way to express their disagreement. The president’s inauguration will grant power to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which previously controlled Mexico for 71 years until 2000.
Analysis:
Although it’s unclear exactly how the hackers from the group “Ciber Protesta Mexicanas” came about to hack these governmental websites, there are many measures that could have prevented this breach. The attacks seemed to be fairly easy to conduct so it could have been easily prevented with the right security measures A necessary step to take is to make sure you have a mitigation plan in pace and encourage ongoing security awareness among the board members which should include testing and validating authorized items are working properly. There should be frequent tests and network audits to ensure that only authorized items are on the network. A major security measure is to implement a fire wall and to turn off any unused user IDS or unused ports on routers. Finally, the agencies should continually update any applications to have applicable security patches are properly installed. If the governmental agency websites were so easily hacked, there needs to be proper security measures in place straight away.
A group of Mexican hackers identifying themselves as the “Ciber Protesta Mexicanas”, hacked numerous government websites on their independence day. All the hacked pages were replaced by a brief message criticizing the Mexican government. Their goal was to instill in the minds of the various government agencies, political parties, ministries that the recent election of President Felipe Calderon was in many ways fraudulent. They claimed that this is a peaceful cyber protest by students, workers and productive Mexicans who are fed up with recent activities by the Mexican government and are looking for a way to express their disagreement. The president’s inauguration will grant power to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which previously controlled Mexico for 71 years until 2000.
Analysis:
Although it’s unclear exactly how the hackers from the group “Ciber Protesta Mexicanas” came about to hack these governmental websites, there are many measures that could have prevented this breach. The attacks seemed to be fairly easy to conduct so it could have been easily prevented with the right security measures A necessary step to take is to make sure you have a mitigation plan in pace and encourage ongoing security awareness among the board members which should include testing and validating authorized items are working properly. There should be frequent tests and network audits to ensure that only authorized items are on the network. A major security measure is to implement a fire wall and to turn off any unused user IDS or unused ports on routers. Finally, the agencies should continually update any applications to have applicable security patches are properly installed. If the governmental agency websites were so easily hacked, there needs to be proper security measures in place straight away.